Article on Redd (long)

[johnspierce]

My sister-in-law is one of the editors for the Austin American Statesman and since she knows I am a big Redd Volkaert fan, she found this article published last August and sent it to me - thought y'all might like to read it.

-------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2005 The Austin American Statesman
Austin American-Statesman (Texas)

August 7, 2005 Sunday

SECTION: LIFESTYLE; Pg. K1

LENGTH: 2387 words

HEADLINE: Redd brawn;
An unassuming man with an imposing guitar style, Volkaert plays the
reluctant frontman

BYLINE: Patrick Beach, AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

BODY:


Coming up near Vancouver, B.C., the Volkaert boy was . . . he doesn't
want to say poor, exactly, he just never wanted a lot of stuff. But
when his dad came home with a Fender Esquire, that the kid wanted.

It was a '58 model of Fender's first electric solid-body guitar-- and
this was around 1970 or '71. The precursor of the legendary Telecaster
had a white ash body with a white pickguard, a tiny coffee stain on the
case but no wear on the guitar; the lacquer was still on the neck.

The guy who'd bought the Fender had taken a couple of lessons, quit
because it hurt and traded the thing in at the music store for a piano
or organ for his wife. When the kid's dad took the music store owner
for an undetermined sum at the pool table one night, he came home and
told the boy, "I got a guitar for you that you're going to like."

But, the father said, you have to buy it from me for $200. That is a
lot when you're 12 or 13 years old and making $30 a month throwing
newspapers for the Vancouver Sun.

The kid was already playing a lot, mostly just fooling around. Can I
play it with my friends, he asked?

The father said, no, if you don't pay it off, I've got to keep it in
good shape so I can sell it. But you can play it for 20 minutes or so
on Sundays.

The kid everybody called Redd fell asleep with that guitar on his bed
every night for years, waking up and playing it first thing in the
morning, playing it when there was a minute's practice time to snatch,
when he was supposed to be in school, when one of his parents' records
was on and he listened and tried to cop licks.

Redd Volkaert, now 47 (born Justin Volkaert on March 6, 1958, the same
year as the guitar, same birthday as Bob Wills), still has that guitar
-- which he paid off in about six months. And he'll never sell it, not
ever, because something in that guitar brought out a talent in him that
made him what he is today: a very busy if not filthy rich guitar player
possessed of genius.

Is he, in fact, the best guitar player in town? A crazy and unprovable
claim.

So. OK. Yes, Redd Volkaert is the best guitar player in Austin, even if
you've never heard of him.

Within the local music community, there is a cult of Redd. Players on
their way to their own gigs will stop into Volkaert's regular Saturday
afternoon sessions at the Continental Club -- where the band plays for
tips -- to get a cold beer and a free guitar lesson. He shares stages
with players who've worked for big-time musicians. He was for six or
seven years Merle Haggard's lead player.

Online message groups for Telecaster geeks post messages with things
like "In Redd we trust" in the subject line. He's featured in several
recent issues of Vintage Guitar magazine. He plays Telecasters he
builds himself from parts he gets off eBay -- even the Fender decals
that go on the headstock. The '58 Esquire is too valuable to gig with,
so he keeps it in storage.

There he is on the Continental stage, with his beard and tattooed
forearms the size of Virginia hams, making his guitar do things that
have other players shaking their heads, thinking, should I practice
more or just quit?

Some guitarists can play really, really fast but don't have anything to
say. Some use volume to cover up a lack of technique. Volkaert seldom
floors it. When he does, you can practically feel the G forces pushing
on you. And his solos are funny; in the middle of an amazing run he'll
throw in a little levity -- the wrong note in exactly the right place.

He plays old-time country with a little swing -- George Jones and Floyd
Tillman and the like, and his own songs -- often in a trio setting that
changes as it moves around town five or six nights. Jovita's, Ego's,
the Continental Club, Threadgill's (north and south), Central Market
(ditto). His help includes steel and dobro player Cindy Cashdollar,
winner of five Grammy awards who's worked with Asleep at the Wheel, Bob
Dylan and many more.

On Sunday nights he's at the Continental with Heybale, Austin's country
dance group that includes alums from Junior Brown, Brian Setzer and
Johnny Cash. His extensive discography includes solo albums and
sessions with dozens of other artists, including Haggard, local fixture
Dale Watson and sometimes-sideman Billy Dee.

At risk of stating the thunderously obvious -- twice -- a pair of
observations: The first is that life is not fair. Great talent does not
necessarily mean a big contract with a major label, one's own private
plane, cavorting with supermodels, the requisite descent into drugs,
booze and mouth-foaming madness followed by a redemptive VH1 "Behind
the Music" segment. No matter how good you are or ever hope to be, you
are not likely to be widely known if you aren't young, aren't skinny,
aren't pretty.

The second is that Austin is blessed with a staggering amount of
musical talent. Imagine that concentration of talent has whirled into a
sphere, like the Earth. On the surface, a handful of the young and
skinny and pretty ones bask in the light and the cool of wide acclaim.
Below the surface, hundreds more -- often no less talented, sometimes
more -- toil in the dark, hot, sulfurous and smoky (though not for much
longer, as the smoking ban looms Sept. 1) underground.

They can curse the Fates for making them unyoung, unskinny, unpretty,
for not rewarding them commensurate to their talents.

Or they can be like Redd Volkaert. They can be glad they have a gig.
They can be happy to be a working musician.

The kid took lessons for a while. Then his teacher put a piece of music
in front of him and told him to play something -- it might have been
"Can-Can." Redd played "Can-Can." The teacher told him the music he was
looking at wasn't "Can-Can."

Busted. The kid was just watching the teacher's fingers, playing by
ear. The teacher called Redd's dad and told him to save his money. It
was just easier for the kid to play those Deep Purple records over and
over, hunting and pecking until he got close to what Ritchie Blackmore
was doing.

Sometimes when he was supposed to be in school he was hanging out at
the music store, playing guitars, running across the street to the
little diner, the Roundup Cafe, to hear new tunes on the jukebox, going
back to the music store to hash out the song he'd just heard.

After cutting his teeth in British Columbia clubs -- all of them -- he
moved to Alberta at 17 to play, and Volkaert hasn't really had a job
outside of music since. If he has to drive a backhoe or rebuild
carburetors, no big deal. But he says:

"I'm the luckiest SOB in the world because I get to play guitar and
people pay me for it."

Volkaert hung around California for a few years, then headed to
Nashville, where he did live gigs, studio work and hooked up with Don
Kelley's band, known for being a kind of finishing school for
Nashville's hottest session musicians.

"I've had the best guitar players in this town through that band,"
Kelley says. "If I had to take my pick out of all of them, it'd be Redd
for the style and the taste and the tone. It has to go to Redd. And my
other guitar players would have to agree. He got his guitar out and
scared everybody to death. Nobody has the approach to the Fender
Telecaster like Redd Volkaert."

Volkaert had jammed with members of Haggard's band, the Strangers, and
one day in 1997 he answered the phone and was offered a dream gig:
playing guitar with Merle. Deeply influenced by the late Roy Nichols,
Haggard's legendary picker from the classic incarnation of the
Strangers, Volkaert didn't hesitate for long.

Then he called his mother and said, "Guess who I got a gig with?"

"Merle Haggard."

"Yup."

As he recalls this conversation over enchiladas at El Sol y La Luna,
the smile on Redd Volkaert's face is so broad and vivid you'd think the
call happened this morning.

"It's so unreal the way it's worked out," he says.

Playing so much, and with so many different people, made Volkaert
almost inhumanly versatile, but he was never a bandleader, never
stepped into the light. The joy of the music is its own reward for some
players, and as long as they're busy and eating, that's enough. Rolling
Stone can put somebody else on the cover.

"He was Haggard's guitar player for years. If you're a Tele player, can
you achieve more success than that?" asks Austin guitar teacher and
Telecaster freak Tony Redman. "That's the top of the heap, man."

As there is a cult of Redd, there's a Tele cult. Revered for its twang,
it's the workhorse instrument for everybody from Bruce Springsteen to
Vince Gill.

"It's hard to use," Volkaert says, "but once you get a handle on it you
can get a lot more out of it."

Indeed, listening to Volkaert, it's hard to imagine all that sound is
coming out of a guitar with two pickups and no tremolo bar. (Volkaert
can get a slight vibrato effect by pressing the body of the guitar
toward his torso and the back of the neck out, those hams looking like
they're about to snap the Tele in two.)

The variations that Volkaert gets within those limitations means that
no matter what setting he's playing in, Redd Volkaert's music is almost
always accompanied by the sound of jaws scraping barroom floors. The
guy makes the Telecaster a bottomless bag of tricks. What he does to
"Sleepwalk" might change your life.

"The way a true musician plays is a direct reflection of their
personality," Redman says. "Redd is a virtuoso, but he's genuinely
humble and has a great sense of humor and all that comes through when
he's playing. You can hear a virtuoso and it's exciting, and you think,
'OK, that was great.' But when you hear Redd you hear his personality
with the technique and the command of the instrument. Without even
knowing it, he has become a Telecaster guru."

Because of Volkaert's work with Haggard and others, not to mention
chronic Austin-Nashville cross-pollination, people here knew who he was
when he moved to town five years ago.

Of course it had to be Austin, long a beacon for people a little
outside the mainstream, eccentrics. It's the only right place for
countless wrong notes, whom we welcome and nurture.

Once here, Volkaert helped revive Heybale, which had started in
Nashville, and when the Sunday night gig didn't seem to be drawing
crowds, Continental owner Steve Wertheimer encouraged the band to keep
at it until it caught on. Now there are two acceptable places to be
late on a Sunday -- home or at the Continental Club.

"That's really my favorite thing to do on a Sunday night in Austin,"
says Chip Taylor, famously the author of "Wild Thing" and about six
billion other hits, who with Carrie Rodriguez give a shout-out in their
song "Dirty Little Texas Story," from the album "The Trouble With
Humans":

Let's go hear ol' Redd and Earl Poole Ball

Play a sad one maybe.

[AJ Love]

wow... very cool

[0le FUZZY]

[*]BEEE-UTE-TEE-FULL !!
<li>Sew rite arm !!
<li>Thank yew fer postin nat typin about the man knowed as REDD.
<li>I got lucky won day and unlike that feller I dent noe all his history but I felt it !! He exudes (fi dollar werd) down home country and heart of the music.
<li>I dunn rit about him once but cannot convey tew yew watt he did for and tew me and my wife.

My version of a short day with Redd.

<li>Thanx again fer postin that !!




Please visit my page

[The Bone]

I didn't realize Redd played with the Don Kelley Band. My wife and I and some of our friends were in Nashville last week for the Raiders/Titans game and had the pleasure of seeing the Don Kelley Band at Roberts Western World. Their tele player was a gentlemen named Porter (didn't catch his last name). He smoked as well.

Love ya' Redd!

[cdobbs7977]

"Telecaster Geeks" ?! Listen, if memorizing serial numbers, spec sheets, and sleeping with your tele is wrong, I don't wanna be right.
If its fine wine, I'm a coinsurer. If its a guitar, I'm a geek. Guilty as charged. That is a fabulous article though.

[Tele295]

Originally Posted by johnspierce

Online message groups for Telecaster geeks post messages with things
like "In Redd we trust" in the subject line.

I'm sure I don't know any of the geeks to whom the author refers.

Maybe I need to change that sig line....

[RoBro]

Fuzzy

My daughter aand I saw Redd with 2 Ds for the second show of that tour with the twangbangers in Portland Oregon at some wine eatery. We saw the sound check and later the show. We tryed to aut eat Him and to no luck !! You only told the half of it !!! He was twice good as you stated !!! We got a bunch of pictutes. There was a guy videoing the show so I didnt and he said that he he videoed all showes there so I gave him $4o.00 for a copl of the show and gave him my card and never heard from him!! I would like to get my hands around his skinny neck. Redd dosent like to out play any one elce so at one break Dallis gave Redd a break so Redd tore it purty good and Thad Dallis said Redd do it again So he got a little wilder Than Dalles said Redd do it again and Redd brought the house down. I was close to him so I was able to get out of the rubble!!! He just stands there and looks bored and his fingers never lift from the strings so you hardly know that he is playing except all the band is looking at him !! Aoo I can say if WOW WOW !! He showed us a good time !!! The first time I saw him With Merle Haggard was also in Portland Oregon and Redd and Merle did a duet. After the show I told Merle that was a good duet and he said I finly have found some one I can play with, !!!

Ronda and I have seen The Merle show about 20 times with Redd and got to be a good frend with him. And what a freind he has beeen!!
Robro Ron

[the velvet catfish]

Thanks for the Read mile high. 8)

[stephent2]

Thanks, brought a tear of joy to mine eyes.

I met Redd in Nashville when he was playing at Roberts, '96 or '97 i think. I was up for a summer NAMM show, he was also playing at a club up on Printers Alley, we saw him as many time we could that week.

I'll never forget the joy in his playing.

I gotta get back to Austin, get more Redd.

[woof*]

looms sept 1?
that happen?

[skepticult]

Does anyone know if Tony Redman is still playing? We used to go check out his old band when they came to Houston and they were awesome.

I think he was in a country band in Austin for a while after that?

I've been going to Austin a lot lately and would be interested in seeing him play if he's still around.